Red Alert: C&C Generals 2 Has No Single-Player

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Is this bold enough for you, Craig? Well, IS IT? This cup of coffee, I mean. I find it to have a very insistent flavor. Oh, and also, Command & Conquer: Generals 2 is doing a pretty crazy thing. Now that the near-future sequel has lined up its troops behind F2P’s mighty monetary banner, it’s casting single-player to the wayside. The focus, for the time being, is squarely on co-op, competitive matches, and e-sports.

Bioware Victory general manager John Van Caneghem explained the sudden gear shift to PCG, noting that his team “really wants to get back to the roots of what made Command & Conquer great.” He added, however, that fan feedback will ultimately shape the game after it goes live, and – provided that demand is there – a single-player mode could creep out from the fog of war (and game development!) at a later date. He explained:

“As a live service I think the exciting part is you can try things. You can see what the community wants, you can give it a shot, you can put it up for a weekend and see how it goes, develop towards what the fans like.”

Also of note: Van Caneghem briefly outlined EA’s plan to give other areas of the C&C universe a similar F2P makeover. “We decided to choose Generals as the first set of games we build under the universe,” he explained, “but we’ll be expanding after that, like Tiberium and Red Alert as well as some others.”

Still, it’s a bit of an odd turn after EA rolled the franchise under the BioWare umbrella and Ray Muzyka very publicly voiced excitement about “finding a way to incorporate BioWare’s vision of genuine emotional engagement and quality, including the attention to story and narrative” into Generals 2.

Even so, this isn’t the end of the world or anything. The original Generals tended to steer clear of C&C’s trademark FMV-fueled brand of camp, so we’re not even missing out on that particular series staple. It would’ve been pretty interesting to see how BioWare’s yarn-spinning prowess would’ve made the leap into RTS land, but that probably never would’ve been the focus. BioWare Victory is just a rebranding of EA’s old Command & Conquer dev studio, so it’s not like a bunch of Mass Effect vets suddenly decided, “Hey, you know what I think I can make? A semi-modern military strategy game. Those have moral choices and calibrations and Urdnot Wrex, right?”

Are you hoping to command and conquer EA’s forums and inboxes until this one gets a story mode, though? Moreover, if that were to happen, I wonder if – in this day and age – EA would allow people to play offline? Perhaps it’d resort to some kind of SimCity-style “online on start up” solution? Aww, now I’ve gone and made myself sad about the state of the industry and stuff.

I could not agree more. The constant abuse is the reason I quit multiplayer rts and moba style games after 3 rounds. I start off with the optimism and enthusiasm of a 14 year old version of myself – “maybe this game is different, it seems to be catering to a more mature base of players.” – Two hours later I’m by myself, sulking, elbow deep in a tube of pringles while watching motivational speeches on the googletubes.

Playing devils advocate here have you thought about it from the other point of view. If your bad at the game your effectively spoiling some one else’s experience. You cant just write some one off as a “hormonally frustrated teenage boy” because they have a desire to win/are competitive. If your not competitive or just want to mess around, play a custom game on Starcraft instead of a ladder 4v4, play a Co-Op vs Bots on DotA2 instead of a ranked match, etcetera etcetera.

I pretty much agree with you, but that’s exactly what makes an RTS with no single-player mode so off-putting. I played several matches of Dota 2 against bots, and all I really learned is that it would take eons to figure out the game that way. I don’t want to ruin other people’s experiences. It’s far easier just not to play at all. For someone who hasn’t played C&C since Red Alert, the last thing I want to do is to learn the ropes against human opponents. It wouldn’t be fun for them, and it wouldn’t be fun for me, either.

Your argument is terrible. If you are competitive don’t join random games. Queue up with your friends that you know are good.

The problem here is internet anonymity/internet tough guy syndrome. People get in a game and everyone thinks they are the best. Face it. If you were the best you wouldn’t be getting match made into groups with people who just picked up the game.

The second problem is bad players like to blame their team. Just because they are jerk offs and verbally assault their teammates doesn’t mean they were good in the first place. It just means they are whiny babies and blame the world when they don’t get what they want.

There are just shitty personalities in life. No social skills. You can be a world class tournament grade player and lose a game with some grace. Especially in a worthless random game with a PUG. There is absolutely nothing on the line for anyone to lose that is of any value.

If some one joins your game and is bad, then they spoil the game for you. Ill use dota as an example because its much more extenuated there. If some one who is on your team is bad then it will cost you the game. Youll have to sit in a game that you know you cant win for 30 mins +, that is not fun.

Its ok if people have tried to play the game or taken advise but when people have blatantly just started trying to play without even having any idea/read any guides, or they just totally refuse to accept constructive criticism then thats just not ok. You spoil the game for every one else.

Except that this happens in unranked matches as well. You shouldn’t have to resort to just playing against bots to avoid getting flamed because you’re still learning the game. MOBAs are inherently multiplayer and playing against bots won’t teach you a damn thing beyond what a tutorial could do. Yet getting in your first match your chances are high that you’ll get flamed to hell and back for DARING to make mistakes, usually by idiots who either are smurfs with a disproportionate amount of skill compared to everyone else, or are just as bad as you but prefer to blame everyone else for their failures.

This right here put me off of playing League of Legends. I really thought it was a fun game, but too many times getting called out and reported to the tribunal for just flat not playing the role one guy thought I should, or trying a class I’ve never played before and being yelled at for being a terrible insert-class-name-here really killed my will to play. You’re not using ability X correctly! You idiot, you can’t fire ability Y from that range, go kill yourself! I’m reporting you, you little bitch!

Dota and RTS games demand too much of an individual player, while simultaneously throwing them in against opponents they may not be hardcore enough to fight, which invalidates their entire reason for being in the game and/or gives the other players a reason to attack them on a personal level. I play Mass Effect 3 coop, and I’m pretty great, but every player has an N7 rating which corresponds to how many times they’ve wiped their character progress to lengthen their e-peen. I haven’t, and I’m stuck at 150 while other players are way up in the thousands, and I get instantly kicked in higher tier games besides having better equipment and better skill than any of those failures, and an unwillingness to stupidly wipe my characters for a useless number. Makes me want to whack my Talon pistol upside their heads and yell, open your eyes, douchebags!

The ultra-competitiveness these games are geared for destroy camaraderie and the fun social environment that should prevail in such an environment, instead kicking newbies and the less self aggrandising players to the wayside in favor of the over-serious monsters interested only in farming points and gaining popularity in a Facebook-sort-of-way, and newbies turn into the same thing just to become competitive. A revolving circle of horribleness which makes it difficult for anyone to examine a game and answer the question: ‘Just from what direction do I even approach this if I want to get in on it?’

The ultra-competitiveness these games are geared for destroy camaraderie and the fun social environment that should prevail

Something I’ve been arguing since the beginning of the Xbox: Microsoft, with the way they structured multiplayer, – but also achievements – fostered an environment that favored players with agonistic profiles to the detriments of others.
A couple iterations later and the whole industry has been twisted this way.

The disappearance of LAN and private servers also contributes to all this I’d say.

I was being charitable describing those who torrent insults as “hormonally frustrated teenage boys”. If you don’t happen to be both hormonally frustrated and a teenage boy then you don’t even have an excuse. If you feel the need to text abuse at team mates then you’re simply an arsehole, period.

The latter one would be the traditional multiplayer experience, while the former would be an entire new way of designing the multiplayer RTS experience (would take a page or two to describe all the ideas and concepts so I’ll stop there, but you can imagine what it could be).

Amen to that. When the game is funded with microtransactions, it’s (very likely) actively harmful to have a single-player campaign (unless you sell it too on a by-mission basis). The very business model here disincentivizes making an SP campaign. And, seeing as i suck at competitive multiplayer and for me it’s SP or coop only, that is a Very Bad Thing.

I disagree. I assumed no campaign, but no single-player is surprising, given the only other high-profile F2P traditional RTS is Age of Empires online, and that’s very SP focused. Albeit through repetitive grind.

Same here. I play games to muck around and have fun; the stress of dealing with rabidly competitive people who insult and scream isn’t worth it, nor is the stress of having to constantly be on my very best game just to avoid being crushed by people who have more time to dedicate to this one game than I have time to dedicate to gaming in general. Single-player is by far the more relaxing, enjoyable and diverse experience for me.

The thing I loved about the Original Generals (or “OG”) was the hilarious campaign. I still use it as an example of mature satire in video games to this day. My interest in this new multi-player only approach is zero. What a shame.

Well, why do you play with them? I’m sure even RTS community has many players willing to play with you.

Also, I’ve played a ton of Company of Heroes, Starcraft 2 and Red Alert 3 and I’ve yet to see typical 14 year old “COD kids” in RTS genre.

If the players even use the chat, 90% of time it’s “glhf” and “gg”. It’s basically a skirmish, but instead of a bot that’s programmed to play bad so you can win, you’ve got an actual opponent that’s doing it’s best to win you.

It’s a shame there’s no story and campaign, but if that’s all you wanted from the game, then don’t buy the game and let the publisher know you wanted the campaign. Personally I’d have wanted to experience it, since original generals had a great campaign, but it’s not a big deal, since that was a fraction of the time I spent with the game.

I can honestly say that for the most part RTS games don’t tend to have too much insult throwing. COD on consoles tends to be much, much worse.

Instead, what happens with RTS is smurfs who apparently find it valorizing to be steamrolling newbies instead of finding a challenger of their skill level. It’s rather frequent, especially in games where matchmaking isn’t too polished, to get utterly annihilated within the first five minutes with no understanding of what happened. I’m sorry but that’s not my definition of fun.

MOBAs however are another story. You’re just about guaranteed to run into assholes within your first few matches. People who will blame everyone but themselves while playing in level 5 unranked random matches.

I never have bought a game that features no single player.
Especially in an RTS I expect a good, competent and interesting AI and a versatile, re-playable skirmish mode with heaps of maps. A good campaign with a cool story is important too, but I consider it secondary to the single player skirmish mode and good AI.
–
An online-only/mp-only RTS most of the time is only a temporary hype, but if I like a game I might be playing it for the next ten years until something better comes along.

I do not want to have to rely on others for playing my favorite RTS. For example I have been playing Supreme Commander FA fanatically since its first day of release. I has a reasonable AI, even better AI mods and an incredible amount of skirmish maps and pro mods. SupCom FA is infinitely entertaining to me. And there is no RTS like it. Nothing comes close in scope and epicness. And I expect nobody will make an RTS that can compete with SupCom FA anytime soon.

The good thing is that because of its Single Player Skirmish modes, its AI and all the other stuff I can play it forever without having to deal with matchmaking, socializing and other bullshit. The game has infinite value for me. That is why I bought 2 physical retail copies and 1 copy on Steam.

For me C&C Generals 2 has no value whatsoever. It forces me to depend on unreliable others for my RTS needs with all the grief that goes with it. And who knows, the game might be dead and buried within 2 years, because gaming tends to become more and more about hypes and fads.

But if I love a game I stick with it for many, many years. I have been playing Supcom for 5 years now and I can easily see myself playing it for another 10 years. And that is possible because it is not limited to multi-player gaming.

I know that this particular game looks like shit, but it might be interesting to see some RTS games that focus purely on the multiplayer. Sometimes having a razor sharp focus can be a good thing. Look at TF2 for example, imagine the sacrifices that would have had to have been made if Valve had decided to spend the same amount of resources but with also creating a singleplayer campaign in the game. Or perhaps consider Starcraft 2 and wonder how popular it might have been if it didn’t have the singleplayer campaign but sold for significantly less. It’s just an interesting thing to wonder about.

It’s F2P anyway Angora so you don’t need to buy it, but I’m massively annoyed at no SP. Also the gall at them saying “really wants to get back to the roots of what made Command & Conquer great.” when what made C&C great was a great single player AND a great Multiplayer.
C&C would be nothing without it’s campaigns. Even Generals had a good campaign, not as campy or character based as the Tiberium franchise but it had some gravitas to it, especially when it started getting into the heavy stuff when WMD’s started getting used.

As a consultant in the IT-industry (Business Intelligence being my specialty), let me assure you, large companies can indeed act like idiots. In my experience, having done consultancy work for both small and large companies, for me the experience has usually been this:

Small company doesn’t have giant IT budget, are usually interested in you doing stuff as efficiently as possible, decision process is often fairly quick and doesn’t involve a lot of competing wills.

Large company has huge budget, areas of responsibility between managers is often overlapping/unclear, decision processes often subject to rivalry, competing wills and politicking. Often all the IT-support and servers have also been outsourced to somewhere on the other side of the world, making simple things like creating user profiles on a server a gargantuan task of filling in huge excel forms and negotiating with people whose first language is quite a bit different than yours.

You know, even though I like it, I sometimes fantasize about them re-relasing Secret World as a single player title with the same engine but slightly altered contents: they could make the world more reactive so that NPCs can permadie for instance, decrease the number of monsters and up their difficulty (since they don’t have to be around in huge numbers for hoards of level appropriate players to harvest) which would make it feel more like survuval horror and less like typical MMO grind, and make combat more like a single player game (no PvP means no need to balance cooldowns etc).

I would pay a high monthly fee for that, even if it were always online.

Seems like a really strange move – but then it seems like the C&C franchise has been going downhill for a while. Perhaps this is a way to mix things up and maybe give Starcraft 2 some competition in the competitive RTS space?

Interesting that Bioware is on-board for creating narrative in a multi-player only environment. Maybe they’re looking at some kind of persistent online campaign as a backdrop for the individual battles, and working out how to integrate an engaging narrative into that rather than it just being about controlling parts of a strategic map. Potentially great if they pull it off, but seems like a bit of a gamble.

I honestly doubt that what you describe fits into EA’s plan here in any way. They just rebranded their LA studio as “Victory Games”, and then as “Bioware Victory”, so there is probably no actual Bioware talent onboard.

Also, does it strike anyone as funny that “Victory Games” is a name you’d expect to see on a floor shelf in the Nineteen Eighty-Four universe, alongside Victory Gin and Victory Cigarettes?

Agreed. I wouldn’t hold your breath in expecting story or narrative in this game, despite what Muzyka has said. In recent years, much of the doctors’ public statements have sounded much like empty marketing speak, to the point where I wonder how involved they actually are in their company’s products.

I saw this coming. F2P and singleplayer don’t really mesh. But the reason Van Caneghem gives is kinda stupid: “wants to get back to the roots of what made Command & Conquer great.” Yeah, what made C&C great wasn’t the multiplayer, especially not co-op. Granted, Generals wasn’t that heavy on the storytelling, but still…

‘noting that his team “really wants to get back to the roots of what made Command & Conquer great.”’

Well, for me that would be the single-player campaign and huge skirmish-matches against the AI. Then again, I had a similar notion about Diablo, which apparently wasn’t shared by the developers of D3, who insisted that multiplayer was the only true way the game was supposed to be played…

No…no, that really was C&C. The only multiplayer I ever played was a handful of supremely stupid lan matches with friends on tiberium sun. An 8-way fuck-mountain of everyone running out of tiberium apart from the recharging dribbles, hordes of GDI fliers dominating anything outside of a base and hordes of invisible obelisks and sam sites defending the NOD bases. Competitive multiplayer it was not.

I don’t really like much single player experience, but i prefer coop games and multiplayer but i really liked CC generals campaign and general challenges, i was really good at MP and owned every friend that played it, but this? F2P = shifty quality if you have to pay 0 to play game sadly game quality is also 0.

This will backfire. Nowhere near the amount of people they believe play these types of games online. They are too difficult unless you’re a total expert, take too long so are too much of a commitment and are just too stressful.

At the same time, I have a hard time believing this will succeed. SC2 has taken almost the entire market that is interested in that sort of thing, and there aren’t many unhappy people in that community. Why switch when there is a thriving pro scene and new content coming?

The only thing I can think of is that EA is hoping to pick up new players with the low barrier F2P entry cost. I suppose I’ll try it.

Of course, it’s because we’re intelligent enough to know you get what you pay for, plus we can see right to the heart of the matter that EA wish to nickel-and-dime us with transactions while pimping our PC’s as ad-space.

If they actually wanted to make a successful title, then they’d have released a fairly straight port of the original generals in a current graphics engine, but with a crop of additional maps. But hey, what to us paying customers know about what we want eh?

1. Most PC games are pirated. (This can be changed for ‘Most Console games are traded in’)
2. Piracy, to publishers is equivalent to a lost sale (This may be true or not)
3. Publishers need to sell the maximum number of copies to make investment in a game worthwhile.
4. Online only games are very difficult to pirate.

Therefore:
Publishers now only want to make online only games.

Also:
1. Publishers don’t want to invest large amounts of money up front into franchises as it is too risky in the current recession.
2. Free to play models are quick to get up and running and start making money early, allowing updates to increase the content.

Therefore:
Publishers now only want to make free to play games

However….
1. A large % of Joe Public doesn’t want to play multiplayer.
2. A large % of Joe Public gets annoyed when they have to play a single player game online and they see it as DRM.
3. A large % of Joe Public doesn’t like the way most companies have implemented Free To Play (League of legends for example isn’t too bad)

Therefore:
Joe Public won’t buy/play these games and they will fail.

What’s the solution?

I don’t know.

I do think that console’s will start having players download full games to consoles (rather than in store) and then only that console can play the game, second hand sales will die and then big single player experiences will re-emerge. No idea how it gets sorted on PC though.

“Piracy, to publishers is equivalent to a lost sale (This may be true or not)”

Yeah, that’s pretty much unequivocally false.

Most of the pirates are young males who pirate sometimes dozens of games a year. Most literally do not even have the money to buy everything they’ve pirated, much less voluntarily buying them all in the absence of piracy.

In any case, a game company’s job is to make money on games, not to fight piracy. Plenty of games make lots of money despite high levels of piracy. For an example see.. any popular video game for the last 15 years.

But, to a publisher that can see their game being copied on a torrent by 200k people a day on release, you can understand why they aren’t happy. Of course those 200k people won’t have bought the game, but if no one could have pirated it, i’m sure ‘some’ of them would have. If ALL games couldn’t be pirated, i’m pretty sure pirates would end up paying money to play some games and not give up completely.

Listen, I agree that, if there weren’t any pirates, there might be a small increase in PC video game sales. It couldn’t possibly be large, as money doesn’t appear out of nowhere and people aren’t likely to massively rebalance their budget to change the “food/rent/clothes/bills:PC games” spending ratio, but, yeah, it would have a small effect. On the margins.

However, I also agree that a postman would have an easier job if it didn’t rain, and that truckers would be happier if people could drive correctly.

Wish in one hand, shit in the other. See which fills up first.

Back on planet Earth, postmen have to deal with rain, truckers have to deal with shitty drivers, and game developers make somewhat less revenue than they should.

At the end of the day, game developers should worry about making games that sell. Not wishing away things they can’t change.

Except that you actually meant to say a small % of Joe Public doesn’t like those things (2 and 3 at the least). That’s all vocal minority.

Also, to my knowledge, F2P games have been pretty successful in general. TF2 and LoL come to mind. Maybe some smaller releases haven’t, but I haven’t heard of them so the issue is most likely brand related (or I am simply uninformed).

The only reason I’m not sure this C&C will gain ground is that Starcraft has already cornered the RTS e-sport scene, which is what EA is going for.

Im so pissed about this PC pirating excuse.
Im from Serbia and here we have “specialized stores where they crack up PS3 and XBOX’es” so you can mount any disk copy of a cracked game. And fuck it, I say.
PC is bigger in pirating numbers because there are more people with PC then XBOX or PS3 out there. And IF you try to compare numbers only 10 to 20% less then PC of pirated copies goes to XBOX and PS3.

Name them? Except World of Goo.
And how many pirates after they pirated game bought it? Nobody knows. But number is still 90%.
It is ungrateful . Im not defending piracy . Im defending PC market. And Yes I did compare the numbers. As I said .

You have to compare number of PC with number of Xbox / PS3 and then divide the number. You would be surprised that pirating is almost on equal based on percentage.

Assuming you can’t purchase superior units I’d actually be very interested in a free, quality RTS. You know, despite what you guys are saying about immature players I can honestly say I see Bad Manners in SC2 about once in every 100 games.

I usually only play the single-player campaigns in strategy games, but my friend, who’s much more of a strategy nut than I am, ignores them outright and goes straight into skirmish. He tells some pretty interesting tales about the glory days playing ruthless LAN sessions of AoE II back in college, where every week someone would come up with a new strategy that took a few games before the others figured out how to counter.

Just some facts on the original C&C:general:
* The original C&Cg was one of the most fun RTS at the time in multiplayer. Its factions design and new concepts were fantastic at the time. Also it was quite well balanced.
* The expansion ( Zero Hour ) brought a lot of crazyness and it is still played competitively today. Hell, i even watch some replays from time to time. It is that good.

Competition wise, C&Cg has a very honorable reputation and is easily among the top 5th recent RTS not made by blizzard ( with CoH and DoW1 i guess ).

To be honest i never understood players playing a RTS for its story, the core of the genre lies in multiplayer. It is like not digging the Street Fighter series because of its story…

Incredibly disappointing…. not only will I not be playing this at launch, but with no new story or skirmish mode, there’s little to keep me interested enough to stick around and help boost “demand” for a single player mode.

And I’m enough of a C&C fanboy to have bought and played-to-death every previous C&C game (besides the silly F2P one that’s online now).

It amazes me that the team “really wants to get back to the roots of what made Command & Conquer great.”…. when to me (and I expect many other fans) it’s always been the over-the-top story, cheesy-but-great video production. While I expect a great base-building RTS, it’s those story and single-player bits that have always been the series hallmark in my mind.

I was hoping they’d learn their lesson after the co-op-focused mess that was C&C4 (and the less messy Red Alert 2)… I guess there’s something to be said for determination, but the farther they go down this path, the farther I back away. *sigh*

Command and Conquer -would- benefit from the inclusion of Urdnot Wrex, it’s true.

But yeah, no singleplayer = I can ignore this game. And it kind of makes me wonder how they would know if people want a singleplayer component, since clearly the userbase for a multiplayer game is going to be, you know, people who want a multiplayer game. People like me who want a singleplayer game (and very specifically, a campaign. Skirmish mode against AI does -not- cut it for me in an RTS) will simply never play or spend money on it.